For Parents, Head Start Offers A Double Boost

Program Celebrates 30 Years Of Helping Students, Adults Take Steps To Succeed

August 21, 1995|By BERTA DELGADO Staff Writer

Betty Moore stands in a room filled with cribs and toys and playmats, her brown eyes smiling as she looks around because she's so proud of this place.

It's the kind of place where people from the Carver Ranches neighborhood near Hollywood come to become better parents and where children become better prepared for school.

For Moore, a teacher and social worker who supervises the Head Start Parent and Child Center, it's a special place because it lets her give back a little of what she's received. And Moore thinks she's received a lot in the 11 years since she walked into a Head Start program, which celebrates its 30th anniversary nationwide this year.

She had figured that enrolling her daughter Carla into Head Start at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School would give the 4-year-old girl a better chance of doing well when she started kindergarten. But Moore never thought it would change her own life as well.

"It was Head Start that encouraged me to go on and better my life," said Moore, 37, a wife and mother of three. "And as a parent involved in Head Start, I wanted to touch the lives of other parents and kids and help them benefit as it benefited me."

Head Start, a national federally financed program, was initiated by the Kennedy administration and implemented by the Johnson administration in 1965. Since then, the program, which has often been in danger of being cut, has provided educational, social, medical, dental, nutritional and mental health services for 14.6 million preschool children of low-income families.

The Broward program started with 350 children in about a dozen churches and has grown to include 1,750 children in 48 elementary schools in Broward County. In all, about 20,000 Broward children have been served by the program over the years.

The program's main purpose is to give poor children what they need to make sure they aren't a step behind when they start school.

The program also aims to help parents improve their parenting skills and to involve them more in their children's education. Many parents, such as Moore, become parental aides in the program.

Although Moore knew she was helping the program and helping herself and Carla, she wanted to do more. So she enrolled at Barry University and got her bachelor's degree in social welfare, then her master's degree in social work, all while continuing to work at Head Start.

"I attribute everything to Head Start," Moore said. "I'm living proof of how the program truly works.

"That's my everyday story, motivating and trying to help parents realize you do have a choice, and you do want to make a difference in your own life and your child's life because we are the first role models. Not superstars and athletes - the parents."

Cato Roach, who helped start the program in Broward, remembers that kind of excitement from parents working with him back in 1965.

"Along with teachers, we had some very dedicated parents at that time," Roach said last week at a gathering to celebrate the anniversary by Broward County Schools. "They had to go around looking for churches where we could meet at first."

Willette Hatcher, coordinator of Head Start in Broward County for 26 years, said the program has helped people succeed, and in turn, those same people have made the program a success.

The program has survived many threats of cutbacks, including one this year led by U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Hatcher said the program is safe this year but worries about next year, even though she has received a letter from U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, R-Fort Lauderdale, saying he will continue to back the program.

"You have to stay vigilant because every two or three months there's talk about yanking it or reducing it or taking out components, and we find that very disturbing," Hatcher said. "So we keep writing letters and communicate with other programs to inform them of what's going on."

Betty Moore's daughter Carla, now 15, was one of those letter writers.

She told Gingrich how the program helped her and her mother and how well they are doing now.

"I think Head Start gave me a better start than some other kids less fortunate than me because they didn't get to go," the South Plantation High freshman said.

Betty Moore can't say enough how her life has changed thanks to the program.

"I was one of those parents who didn't have a career or goal in life," she said. "I was just existing. I think Head Start made me what I am today."